In an earlier post, I collected memories from the times before the advent of digital technology in music.
With the introduction of digital technology, the world of audio went through a revolution. Initially, most people experienced the effect of this revolution indirectly, when the recording and processing in the studios switched to digital. The music was still distributed on cassettes, but one could see a marked improvement in the quality and fidelity, as the digital process provided advance techniques to do so. These tapes used to be labeled “Digital Recording” to highlight this switch.
Soon afterwards, Compact Disks (CDs) and CD players arrived on the scene, allowing the music to be delivered in digital form. It resulted in a several folds improvement in the quality of sound. When I first listened to a flute recital by Pt Hari Prasad Chaurasia on my friend’s CD player, I was completely amazed at the clarity of its sound. It was apparent that this is the future of music. The CDs were hard to afford in the beginning, and very few titles were released on CDs. However, with time, CD players became more common, and availability of CD titles improved as well.
With this, a new class of CD based Karaoke systems were available, that played the background music on CD, and recorded the mixed song on tape. I got myself such a system from Panasonic in 2001. Around the same time, sensing the interest in Karaoke, music companies came out with good quality Karaoke CDs of Hindi songs. I was a regular buyer of these CDs at the nearby PlanetM stores. I had a lot of fun doing recordings on my Panasonic. Using digital techniques, it allowed change of pitch of music to suit your voice. I found it very convenient to use “Key Down” feature to lower the pitch for songs that go very high. I was still using the CDs for background music only and the recording was analog on the tape. As an example of the recordings done at that time, listen to the tracks below - chand si, koi jab, and chookar mere man ko.
While these "key down" tracks were convenient to sing with, they sounded somewhat off-color, and dull. And this was the second important lesson for me. You have to sing a song in its original pitch if you want it to sound good. I made tape copy of the karaoke tracks and used my long daily commute hour to enjoy and practice singing with these tracks. With the passage of time, I regained the ability to render these songs in the original pitch, and that was a big relief.
Around the same time, I had my first brush with digital recording when I used my home computer to record a few songs in my brother’s voice using the PC microphone and Windows Sound Recorder. The recording itself was very clear and noise free. I also used Cool Edit audio editor to add reverb to the recording, and the results were cool. Listen to the tracks below as an example - aise to na dekho and aadmi aadmi ko kya dega.
However, I knew that the digital recording was not feasible for me at that time as each wav file was taking close to 100 MB of disk space and my 20 GB hard disk would have been filled very soon. So, I did not pursue it for next few years. It would return when the disk space issue is resolved with availability of large low cost USB hard disks.
After a few years, when I got a new computer with a bigger 120 GB disk, I tried to revive the digital recording again. I had also learned to use the compressed MP3 format, which takes just 5 MB for a song. In the next post, I will recollect the fun unleashed by bringing a computer in my music activities.
Read Next Post in the series - Fun with Digital Recording
Music Series - My Experiences
Welcome to my Music Series blogs. There are following posts in this series;
No comments:
Post a Comment
Did you like this post? Please leave a comment - your feedback gives me encouragement for writing. Please subscribe to my blog to support it. - Sanjay